Over the pandemic I picked up a hobby of digging really deep into the history of the Bible.
It’s so much more interesting than I would have ever thought, and so opposite what everyone (on both sides of the topic) tends to think.
An early history of powerful women peeking through a patriarchal rewrite.
A likely foreign introduction of an Exodus tale from the sea peoples.
A famine story turned into a flood from Babylonian influence.
A generic ‘adversary’ term (‘Satan’) during conversion from a polytheistic story to monotheism leading to the most extensive fanfiction in history.
A version of Jesus referring to contemporary ideas around evolution and atomism in Leucretius being declared false heresy by the group that goes on to be canonized.
Yet again empowered women having their history rewritten by patriarchal opposition.
For someone who has always enjoyed solving little puzzles, it’s been a gift that keeps on giving.
Sort of. One of the things I see as a common mistake in analyzing the Bible is the attempt to harmonize the different books of the Bible into a single picture of the origin and nature of a figure in it.
So yes, the storm god that shows up in Job is almost certainly coming from the ANE storm god stories which had that god defending a sea monster.
But that isn’t necessarily where ‘Yahweh’ was originating, as much as perhaps a later syncretism with local mythos.
And ultimately, I’d argue for a case that the significance of Yahweh was mostly as consort, potentially mirroring the Shasu (the only bronze age association with Yahweh) having had a real world political marriage to a high priestess of the Queen of Heaven, which was typically Yahweh’s wife in early archeology and was elsewhere in the ANE married to the storm god who slayed the sea beast.
That marriage is later overwritten and regarded as a corruption of an earlier monotheistic tradition, but such monotheism is anachronistic for that earlier period when it is archeologically evidenced as widely polytheistic.
So while I do think it’s helpful with videos like that broadening people’s horizons from what they might hear by modern believers in the texts, the actual picture is potentially far more complicated than a direct transmission of ANE parallels.
Even a story like Noah’s Ark, which fits with a storm god, appears to be a later incorporation of Babylonian flood mythos on top of an earlier Noah story as the hero of a famine story, not a flood story (Idan Dershowitz has a compelling paper on this).
Over the pandemic I picked up a hobby of digging really deep into the history of the Bible.
It’s so much more interesting than I would have ever thought, and so opposite what everyone (on both sides of the topic) tends to think.
An early history of powerful women peeking through a patriarchal rewrite.
A likely foreign introduction of an Exodus tale from the sea peoples.
A famine story turned into a flood from Babylonian influence.
A generic ‘adversary’ term (‘Satan’) during conversion from a polytheistic story to monotheism leading to the most extensive fanfiction in history.
A version of Jesus referring to contemporary ideas around evolution and atomism in Leucretius being declared false heresy by the group that goes on to be canonized.
Yet again empowered women having their history rewritten by patriarchal opposition.
For someone who has always enjoyed solving little puzzles, it’s been a gift that keeps on giving.
I’ve watched a couple videos from Esoterica. His videos are wild. Who could have expected that the biblical God came from a storm-warrior god?
Sort of. One of the things I see as a common mistake in analyzing the Bible is the attempt to harmonize the different books of the Bible into a single picture of the origin and nature of a figure in it.
So yes, the storm god that shows up in Job is almost certainly coming from the ANE storm god stories which had that god defending a sea monster.
But that isn’t necessarily where ‘Yahweh’ was originating, as much as perhaps a later syncretism with local mythos.
And ultimately, I’d argue for a case that the significance of Yahweh was mostly as consort, potentially mirroring the Shasu (the only bronze age association with Yahweh) having had a real world political marriage to a high priestess of the Queen of Heaven, which was typically Yahweh’s wife in early archeology and was elsewhere in the ANE married to the storm god who slayed the sea beast.
That marriage is later overwritten and regarded as a corruption of an earlier monotheistic tradition, but such monotheism is anachronistic for that earlier period when it is archeologically evidenced as widely polytheistic.
So while I do think it’s helpful with videos like that broadening people’s horizons from what they might hear by modern believers in the texts, the actual picture is potentially far more complicated than a direct transmission of ANE parallels.
Even a story like Noah’s Ark, which fits with a storm god, appears to be a later incorporation of Babylonian flood mythos on top of an earlier Noah story as the hero of a famine story, not a flood story (Idan Dershowitz has a compelling paper on this).